Books, arts and culture

Ancient Egypt

The beautiful one has come

ON December 6th 1912 Ludwig Borchardt, a German archaeologist, and his excavation team uncovered a spectacular bust of Queen Nefertiti. They were digging in the ancient Egyptian city of Akhetaton (now Tell el-Amarna), founded by Pharaoh Amenhotep IV, later known as Akhenaten. “You cannot describe it with words. You must see it,” wrote Borchardt in his diary. This winter the Neues Museum in Berlin, home to the Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection, is commemorating the 100th anniversary of the discovery with a major exhibition of artefacts from the Amarna period (between 1353 BC and 1336 BC).

Borchardt's team of 200 workers spent five years excavating the city, and collected between 7,000 and 10,000 artefacts. According to international archaeological rules of the time, these finds were divided equally between the archaeologists and the country of origin—in this case the German Oriental Company (Borchardt’s employer) and the French Service des Antiquités, which represented the interests of the Egyptians until 1952. The painted plaster and limestone bust of Queen Nefertiti, whose name translates into “the beautiful one has come”, was sent to Berlin alongside 5,000 other objects. It was donated to the Egyptian Museum in Berlin by James Simon, patron of the arts and sponsor of the excavations, and displayed to the public in 1923. Since then it has become commonly known as Berlin’s “most beautiful Egyptian ambassador”, attracting a million visitors each year.

In 2007 Zahi Hawass, the former secretary-general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, unsuccessfully campaigned for the bust to be repatriated. But neither the current director of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo nor the Egyptian government have made such demands. The German media have recently rekindled rumours that Borchardt tricked the Service des Antiquités about the true value of the bust in order to keep it. But Hermann Parzinger, president of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, declared recently that his foundation is “without any doubts the legitimate owner of the Nefertiti bust” and that it will stay put “because she is so fragile”.

Now at Neues Museum in Berlin some 400 objects from the Amarna period are being displayed together for the first time, including Borchardt’s trove and loans from the British Museum, the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Louvre in Paris. The show features various busts of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, blue-painted ceramics, glass jewellery, Egyptian faience, and artefacts in metal and leather, all alongside books, photographs, newspaper clippings and videos that place everything in context. Plenty of ink is spilled over the significance of Atenism, a religion established under Akhenaten, which defined Aten (the sun) as the supreme deity, and marked an important shift from polytheism to monotheism.

The bust of Nefertiti is the inevitable centrepiece of the show, not only for its beauty but also because it is so contentious. A full section of the show details the history of the excavation and the diplomatic issues that have troubled the discovery ever since. After the first world war Germany lost its excavation licence for Egypt. The Service des Antiquités swiftly issued several restitution requests, which nearly led to an exchange of the bust for two remarkable objects from the Cairo Museum in 1930. But the information was leaked to the Berlin press, which prompted a storm of protest. And so the bust has remained. Germany has since regained excavation licences for Egypt, but not for the Amarna site. Last year, however, German scientists started working on a British excavation project there led by Barry Kemp, whose progress is explored in the exhibition.

This show seems to be an opportunity to smooth ruffled feathers. At the opening of the exhibition on December 6th, Mohamed Higazy, Egypt’s ambassador to Berlin, declared that he was happy to see the bust in Berlin. He avoided the controversy and instead praised the long-lasting archaeological relationship between Egypt and Germany. Nefertiti, he said, was an important ambassador, not only for Ancient Egypt but also as a symbol for timeless beauty and grace. “Nefertiti belongs to all of us," added Mr Parzinger. "She is part of the world’s cultural heritage.”

“In the Light of Amarna: 100 years of the Nefertiti Discovery” is at Neues Museum in Berlin until April 13th 2013

Readers' comments

The most amazing is that in the Egyptian countryside they still look pretty much the same, to this day! Incredibly tall (180+cm for women is not exceptional) and slender, with the same bone structure and (esp. older women) a glance sharp as a bird's. Here my neighbor (she obviously is not as made up but..)http://innovatsioon.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/012re.jpg

Atenism was not established under Akhenaten. The cult of Aten was much older and had been given increased royal support already by Amenhotep III. What Akhenaten did was to make the cult of Aten THE Royal Cult and Aten the principal god to be worshipped by the king.

According to Professor Jan Assmann, a German Egyptologist and contributor to the exhibition's comprehensive catalogue, "early forms of the new Atenism existed under Amenhotep III but that was something different." It was Amenhotep IV (or Akhenaten) who established it as a religion, meaning as a state or official religion, which defined Aten (the sun) as the supreme and according to Professor Assmann even "sole and only deity". I apologise, if I did not say that clearly enough in my piece. CG

Borchardt, the Egyptologist who is supposed to have discovered the Nefertiti bust said that there was not supposed to be an eye in the empty socket, because it was understood that the bust was to be a model from which less experienced sculptors would copy the features of the Queen. The question is: would Akhenaten or Nefertiti have allowed the chief sculptor Tuthmose to represent the queen with ONLY one eye? that would have been a "lese-Majesty". And were the sculptors supposed to copy the features of the Queen only with one eye?

Let's face it. Very soon you'll be reading in the newspapers that the bust is a fake.

Egyptologist Robert Steven Bianchi, former Curator at the Brooklyn Museum said that Borchardt was involved in a forgery ring. He is absolutely right.